Picture This!
Symposium on Photography and Narrative in Contemporary Literature

Friday, March 17th
Penn Humanities Forum
3619 Locust Walk

9:00 am-5:30 pm

pre-registration (required): 215.573.8280.
Free. Public invited.

In 1837, when Nicore Niepce and Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre invented
process called daguerreotype, they probably had no idea of the flood of
photographic images that would follow. Early photographs were unable to
capture movement, but they could offer documentary evidence of persons or
objects, or rival an older artistic medium, painting. In recent years,
photography has stepped up its competition not only with the painted
image, but also with the written word. Novelists like W.G. Sebald and
Orhan Pamuk include photographs in their work, interspersing their words
with images. What is the function of these photographs? How do they change
the literary text? And how do we read them?

Presented by the Penn Humanities Forum, Departments of German, English,
Romance Languages, and History of Art, and Program in Comparative
Literature and Literary Theory.

Program

9:00am
Welcome

Wendy Steiner, Co-Director, Penn Humanities Forum
Liliane Weissberg, Topic Co-Director 2005-2006, Penn Humanities Forum

9:15am - 10:45am
Mapping the Terrain
Session Chair: Marlies Schweitzer (Penn Humanities Forum)

Ulrich Baer (New York University),
Desiring Stories: How Photographs Engender Narrative.

Nancy Shawcross (University of Pennsylvania/Penn Humanities Forum),
Surveying the Library

10:45am-11:00am Coffee Break

11:00am - 12:30pm
Theorizing History
Session Chair: Maurice Samuels (University of Pennsylvania/Penn Humanities
Forum)

Marcy Dinius (Penn Humanities Forum),
From the Birth of Photography to the Death of the Author: Melville and
DeLillo.

Gerhard Richter (University of California, Davis),
Unsettling Photography: Kafka, Derrida, Stefan Moses

12:30pm -2:00pm Lunch Break

2:00pm - 3:30pm
Crime Scenes
Session Chair:
Alexandra Pappas (Penn Humanities Forum)

Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania),
Revisiting Benjamin's Scene of the Crime

Karen Beckman (University of Pennsylvania/Penn Humanities Forum),
Nothing to Say': Mortal Words and Photographs

3:30pm- 4:00pm Coffee Break

4:00pm- 5:30pm
Mourning and Melancholia
Session Chair:
Liliane Weissberg

Anneleen Masschelein (K.U. Leuven/ Universiteit Amsterdam),
Can Suffering Be Exquisite? Notes on Sophie Calle's Exquisite Pain and
Three Types of Autofictional Staging of Grief

Adrian Daub (University of Pennsylvania),
W.G. Sebald's Invisible Captions: Photography and the Construction of
Melancholia

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Liliane Weissberg
Graduate Chair, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Sciences
and Professor of German and Comparative Literature
University of Pennsylvania
747 Williams Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
phone (215) 898-3343 or 898-7332
fax (215) 573-7794

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